From the Empire
by speaker4thesilent
Summary: YAHF Buffy and the gang choose different costumes for Halloween. Chaos ensues. Challenge answer.
1. Prologue

I was disappointed to see this challenge, cuz, frankly, I was looking forward to seeing Weaver's story on this. However, since I've had a plot bunny chewing on my ankle intermittently about this since we talked about it, I decided to answer this one.

I own nothing except my imagination. Answer to challenge 2808 on TTH.

XXXXX

Prologue

Willow looked at the costumes around her like a small child trapped on the tracks looks at an oncoming train. "Um, Buffy, I don't think these are right for me at a-"

"Oh, don't be ridiculous," Buffy interrupted. "Halloween's the one night that we can be ourselves without needing to worry about what people think," the faux blond continued.

"Okay. Be myself." The redhead repeated. "I'll just be over here, doing . . . things," she said as she tried to slip away. Buffy was having none of it.

"Oh, come on, Wills!" Buffy takes a quick look over the nearer racks and randomly grabs a black dress that would have been downright modest if it hadn't been quite so short and a pinkish wig and undershirt with striped black and white stockings. The Slayer frowns at what appears to be a headband with cat ears and tosses it back onto the pile. "Here. This is in your size, and it's different that what you'd usually wear," Willow, on the other hand, is staring at her like she's nuts. Buffy, seeing her best friend's resistance uses the one tactical advantage she possesses. While Willow might have mastered the Resolve Face, Buffy was a master of the Kicked Puppy Look, a fact that she took unfair advantage of.

Willow folded. "Alright," she said, taking the clothing from her best female friend's hand.

Feeling a sense of accomplishment in getting the normally timid redhead to try something daring, Buffy turned back to her own costume search just in time to see the store's owner take the dress that she'd been eyeing down from the mannequin and bag it before handing it over to another girl.

_She does _not _have the figure for that! _Buffy fumed as she frowned in irritation and had to forcibly restrain herself from stomping her foot as some flat-chested twelve year old bought the dress that _she'd _had her eyes on. Finally, Buffy admitted the real reason for her irritation. _Angel . . ._

"What's wrong Buff? You look like you've just been diagnosed with cancer of the puppy,"

And now she was really irritated. She knew he meant well, but Xander had the bad habit of opening his mouth and shoving both feet in with surprising regularity. It was all she could do to level a glare at the self-proclaimed "Scooby," _After all, it was my great costume that had just went down the drain_. _I'm in mourning here! _"My costume just walked out the door,"

"So what's the plan? Ya know, I think I saw a Xena costu-"

The full-force Slayer glare cut him off. "Xander, can't you be serious for once!" she half-yelled as she stormed off. _Stupid, irritating. . ._

"Can I help you, Miss?"

She very nearly jumped out of her skin. "Don't do that," she warned calmly as only a Slayer could.

"Ah, I'll keep it in mind," he said with a swallow. "Are you having trouble finding something?" he rallied.

"Yeah," she admitted. "You already sold the dress I was looking at, though. I don't suppose you've got any other costumes for noblewomen?"

Ethan simply smiled. If Buffy had been looking more closely she might have turned and left the store immediately. _Oh this is too wonderful! _"I'm afraid I'm out of costumes for European nobility," at the crestfallen look on Buffy's face he continues, "However, I do have one costume left that you might be interested in," The Englishman leads the way to the back of the room. "That one, there,"

The costume appears to be half armor and half- "That looks like a uniform from the Revolutionary War," she objects, but before she can continue, the Brit cuts her off.

"I can see how you'd think that," he admits. "I suppose you've never studied Russian history, then? That," he says, indicating the mannequin, "is Astharoshe Asran. The Viscountess of Odessa and Duchess of Kiev, one of the premier Nobles of the Empire,"

Ethan was right; Buffy had never cared much for Russian history, and had no idea that he was lying through his eyeteeth. All she heard was 'Duchess' and 'premier noble,' well, that, and she'd finally noticed the plate corset that the mannequin was wearing. She smiled. _Angel couldn't help but notice me in this!_

"I'll take it!"

"Very well. Give me a moment to take these sleeves in; I believe that they're a bit long for you," Ethan said as he pulled the outfit off the mannequin and brought it into the back room. _Oh this is lovely! Such wonderful chaos she'll create! _Ethan had no idea what the dichotomy between Vampire and Vampire Slayer would do to the poor girl, but even the worst-case scenario would probably be better than what those Watcher prats would do to her.

XXXXX

Xander shot a glare at Buffy as she left the shop. So he'd made a joke in bad taste. For crying out loud, it had been a mild one at that! He'd just been trying to make her laugh.

_Maybe that's my problem. _The thought hit him like a bolt of lightning. He'd spent so much time playing the goof that Buffy didn't take him seriously. _I know how to remedy that. _Xander had planned on just dressing as a simple soldier and clowning around with the kids he was supposed to escort. But . . .

_Something to get Buffy's attention is definitely in order. _The question of what that something might be, however, was unanswered. Xander thought about the costume that Buffy had picked out, and then froze. _That was a character from Trinity Blood, I'm sure of it. And the costume she picked out for willow had cat ears. _Xander thought about that for a minute. _No way. _Could Buffy possibly be a closet Anime fan?

Xander's eyes immediately sought out the cosplay racks, but he quickly discovered that most of the good costumes were gone. Finally, after nearly twenty minutes of searching, he stumbled across a red haori and hakama and a beat up looking plastic katana with a silver wig and dog-ears. Inuyasha wasn't his first choice; he was, after all, a little leery of dressing as a half-demon, even one that was basically a good guy. However, it was either the Hanyou or Xellos. Inuyasha won.

It was going to make a hell of a dent in his road-trip funds, but impressing Buffy would be worth it.

XXXXX

So wadda ya think? This 'chapter' is basically to set the stage for the rest of the story. More will follow. For those of you who are waiting for the next chapter of AMH, I'm working on it. However, as my must appears to be on vacation, I don't have a timetable for when it'll be finished. I'm actually closer to finishing the next chapter of We Few.

Drop me a line and tell me what you think. A cookie for the first person to tell me who Willow is dressed as.


	2. Chapter 1: Willow

I'm disappointed. :(

I was sure that somebody would get Willow's costume, but nobody did. Guess I need to remind everyone that diclonius horns look like cat ears. Also, be aware that I have never seen an episode of Elfen Lied or an issue of the corresponding Manga. I'm working off of a friends recollections of the series and the information posted on Wikipedia so some OOCness is probably to be expected. For TTH readers, this story has been moved to the multi-cross section because, as many of my stories do, it has expanded beyond what I had originally intended.

In any case, I do not own BTVS, Trinity Blood, Inuyasha, Elfen Lied, or any of the other crossovers for this story. If I did, I wouldn't still be taking classes in College wishing I knew what I wanted to be when I grow up.

XXXXX

Chapter I

She groaned almost involuntarily and grimaced for a moment before her eyes shot open. _What the? I'm alive? _That simply wasn't possible; she should be dead.

She remembered her last few moments of life in slow motion. She'd been fighting off more than a dozen soldiers from the Institute when it had happened. Well, actually the dozen were in fact the only survivors from over _four_-dozen of the Institute's elites, but in the end, that was neither here nor there. They'd been enough to finish her off, if only barely. She'd just finished killing what she'd thought were the last three of them by the simple expedient of dropping a tree on top of their heads when the bastards had sprung their final trap.

Six different lines of fire at point blank range from high caliber crew-served machine guns.

She'd still managed to avoid the first burst, her vectors leaving massive hand prints in the ground where she vaulted clear over the assassination squad's fire and directly into the first redoubt. Barely three seconds after the poor fools had opened fire on her, they'd been reduced to a mish mash of parts that would take a dedicated team of forensic geneticists weeks to identify as all four of her vectors had slashed across at varying heights hacking through arms, legs, torsos, and heads with equal ease. Their superiors, however, had apparently anticipated her tactics, since they'd planted half a dozen American made Claymore Anti-Personnel mines and multiple kilos of C4 around the gun emplacement. She'd managed to survive that particular trick by the skin of her teeth, picking up a couple of scrapes from ricochets where others would have been turned to hamburger.

Still, the wounds and the concussive force of the blast had slowed her down. She'd cracked the heavy machine gun open like an egg and used her vectors to 'fire' the bullets in it at the gun crew opposite her just before they managed to adjust their weapon's position enough to shoot at her with it, but she'd immediately been forced on the defensive by the remaining four teams. Two hammering at her shelter with fire from their anti-tank machine guns while the other pair were deflected up high to catch her if she tried to vault over the lines of fire that the first two had established. From there the fight had devolved into a sniping match, the soldiers weren't able to hammer their way through the defenses they'd set up for their crew and they, frankly, didn't have anyone left for reinforcements, but she, because of a combination of mounting fatigue and injuries, hadn't been able to get through their defenses either until she'd hit on an elegant solution.

Well, if anything that involved high explosives could be considered elegant.

There were still several dozen rounds of ammunition lying around her from the spilled box that the machine gun had been using. She hadn't bothered with them at first because the other four gun teams were all under cover. Now, however, she gathered them up greedily, ripping the bases out with her vectors and collecting the gunpowder. Five minutes later, with less than a half-dozen pauses to throw things at her attackers, she'd managed to construct something that looked like the porcupine from Hell. Brass casings flattened right where they met the bullet and then stretched out to embrace the next brass casing and the next after that right down to the crimped base of the spiked globe. Having the construct fall on one's head would probably be painful. However, given the fact that it had been filled with the gunpowder that she had collected from the opened rounds and armed with an improvised fuse, her ad hoc grenade would be a less than pleasant experience for the poor bastard it dropped on. She'd peeked her head up over the lip of her redoubt for a moment to sneak a peek at her opponents, specifically the two that had guns aimed at her probable airborne paths. She calculated the trajectory and the force that she'd need to drop it into the leftmost of the two gun placements and, after collecting a bit of smoldering wood, lit the fuse and used her vectors to hurl the fist sized construct.

There was a brief consternated exclamation before the muffled _crack _of the explosion. Before the echoes of the blast faded, she was airborne, her vectors angling her toward the other entrenchment on the left with the idea of reducing the fight to a frontal engagement where all of her enemies would be concentrated in one direction. Midway through the jump, she realized that she'd screwed up. She should have jumped straight at the crew with the other elevated machine gun and removed them first. Had she done that, she would have minimized the amount of time that she was in their sights and quite possibly hit them while they were too surprised to mount an effective resistance. She would also have been inside the zone of responsibility of the emplacement that she'd just blown to hell. Instead, she found herself under attack from the elevated emplacement before she even reached the top of her jump. A weaker diclonius would have been dead, but she had never been considered weak by anyone. Not more than once at least.

The bullets had enough mass and were moving at a high enough speed that they were virtually impossible to deflect successfully. The first cut a gash in her right thigh instead of punching through bone. The second, a shallow groove on the inside of her left arm instead of the left side of her chest. The third glanced off of the outer edge of her fourth rib and sent a shot of pain up and down her right side as the bone snapped. Even so, the soldiers in the redoubt she landed in were dead less than a pair of seconds later.

Now, though, she had a problem. She was wounded; her reaction times would be slowed, and she still had two more gun emplacements and somewhere between eight and ten soldiers to kill. _Nothing for it. _She'd simply have to kill them before blood loss could slow her down too much. She couldn't afford any fancy strategies this time. If she wanted to live, she'd have to hit them hard and fast.

Instead of vaulting through the air as she had before, she employed her vectors in a different fashion. She kept low to the ground using her quartet of vectors almost like legs to dash at her attackers. The first gun pit didn't open up until it was too late. Bullets zinged past her head at a bare inch of separation, but she was close enough by that point that they'd had less than two seconds to fire before she was among them. She used a vector to crush one man's skull and a second to tear another's arm off. Her remaining two vectors lifted off the ground and she flexed her knees as her good leg took over the task of bearing her weight while the pair of vectors, freed from their weight-supporting tasks, smashed the last two soldiers in the emplacement into the ground with sufficient force to break every bone in their bodies.

That however was when she realized that she'd made yet another mistake. This one, however, had been practically unavoidable. She'd assumed that the layout of the weapon emplacements had been set up so that, like the first she'd jumped into, no one could put line-of-sight fire into any of the other pits. If she had been fresh and unwounded, she might have considered that only the one entrenchment had had suicide charges placed in it, or she might have realized that, even with the soldiers herding her towards this ambush, the Institute's flunkies hadn't had a lot of time to dig in.

But she hadn't, and, as a result, she found herself looking directly down the barrel of a 33mm machine cannon at less than twenty yards. For a split second, her mind had simply frozen in surprise. It was to close to avoid and too far away to charge. It had taken her mere moments to kill the soldiers in the fortification she was standing in, but the time it took them to die had given their comrades a chance to retarget. In almost slow motion, she saw the first brass cartridge ejected from the chamber of the anti-tank weapon. At roughly the same time, a hammer of fire slammed into the right side of her chest. Her eyes had gone wide with shock, but neither that, nor the fact that she knew that hit had been fatal stopped her. Even as a second bullet tore the left side of her throat out her vectors hurled handfuls of rock, spilled rounds of ammunition, and even sections of concrete block from the Institute's efforts at fortification into the teeth of her killers.

Lucy had watched, a serene smile on her face, while the last of the Institute's soldiers died, even as one last round from their cannon snapped off her remaining horn flush with her skull. Only then had she allowed darkness to claim her.

And that was it. Any one of those three wounds were fatal injuries; taken together, it was amazing that she'd lived tong enough to kill the last of her attackers. Yet empirical evidence stated that she had somehow survived them. Using the railing on the porch, she quickly levered herself to her feet. She then immediately broke the same into ad hoc weapons with her vectors. _That's not possible._

Her primary persona froze in shock while her Nyu-self cowered in the back of her consciousness. Since the childlike part of her mind that was somewhat more human-friendly wasn't offering any alternate solutions to the situation she found herself in, Lucy responded in her customary fashion. With violence. Four raggedly edged pieces of broken railing scythed into the group of pointy-toothed things that had been eyeing her hungrily. Pointy-toothed things that Nyu swore were demons.

Moments later, Lucy began to give her mental companion's theory more credence when the red and green creatures began to heal at an incredible rate from wounds that should have been fatal. Still, they'd be out of action for a while, and she had other priorities. Like finding out where she was; it certainly wasn't any part of Japan that she was familiar with. Since she had no clue where to begin looking though-

An explosion, muffled slightly by distance interrupted her thoughts. _Or I could find the fighting. _At least there she'd probably be able to find something that she could kill without Nyu bitching at her too much.

XXXXX

Not much, I know, but RL has been busy lately. Between classes, work, and my Dad's cancer surgery I haven't had the time or inclination to write for a while. Thankfully we got the pathology reports back last week and they were all negative, so it looks like the Old Man's going to be around to complain about the time I waste writing and reading fanfics for a whole lot more years.

We few update to follow within the week. (I hope)

And that's it; I'm going back to bed!


End file.
